July 21, 2014

As a meteorologist, I’ve obviously got some thoughts about anthropogenic climate change. Let’s get those out of the way first, so that it’s clear exactly where I am coming from. (Also, there is an increasing trend, with political polarization, for people to simply name-call in “response” to a viewpoint with which they disagree. To the point of view of a typical grassroots activist conservative/tea party type, anyone who disagrees with that ideology in any point whatsoever is a “lib” or some such. To the viewpoint of a typical grassroots activist progressive, anyone who disagrees with anything in that ideology is a “bagger.” With us or against us, ally or enemy, no nuance. It is pathetic and utterly contemptible. But I digress.) I do not question the science of anthropogenic climate change. I take extreme offense to one particular form of skepticism of this hypothesis, in fact… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I accept the science, but I have issues with some of the usual prescriptions for addressing it. I don’t think that it is even viable to demand that everyone give up their cars, stop eating meat, reduce a first-world standard of living to a less advanced one, and move to “sustainable” urban box apartments, let alone that it would be a horrendous overreach to make such demands. Keep out of my garage and thermostat! Furthermore, at this point, even if the developed world dropped emissions to 0, climate change would still continue because of the gas that is already in the atmosphere. It takes a very long time for it to filter out. I think the real solution to the problem is a combination of geoengineering to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and improvement of technologies to limit emissions (without sacrificing quality of life). Technology caused this problem and I think technology is going to have to solve it. And in the meantime, we need to have very sound research on what local and regional impacts are to be expected so that areas can prepare and shore themselves up.

Anyway, that’s the viewpoint I’m coming from. It’s not an exceedingly common one. There is strong resistance to geoengineering in the environmental community, for some reason. Maybe one of these days I will go after the hardline activist left, who are largely deeply opposed to geoengineering, for their belief that control-freak government intervention into people’s private lives will even fix anything (climatologists say it won’t anymore), but that’s not the subject of this post. This post is about the other side of the coin: the climate-change skeptics. It is, let us say, a taxonomy of the types of skepticism currently out there, from least anti-scientific to most.

“It’s the sun” and other alternative, but disproven, hypotheses about the cause

You don’t see too many of these people anymore, but they were abundant a number of years ago. They did not dispute the data indicating that warming was taking place, nor that carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was on the rise, nor—in many cases—that weather events were becoming more extreme as a result of the changes. They just disputed the primary hypothesis about the root cause, namely, man. Instead they offered other suggestions, the most common one being the idea that the sun was increasing its radiation output. The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was proposed as an effect of warming rather than the cause (which is scientifically plausible).

The solar hypothesis was scientific. It was clear, defined, and testable—other effects, such as warming of all layers of the atmosphere, would have been observed, and the radiative output of the sun can itself be measured quite minutely—and therefore scientifically respectable. Adherents of the anthropogenic hypothesis owe these types of skeptics gratitude for proposing it, in fact, because it was an idea that needed to be either validated or disproven before the anthropogenic hypothesis could move forward. It was a rational thing to suggest.

It was just incorrect, as we now know. The sun’s radiative output isn’t on the rise, and all layers of the atmosphere are not warming. The warming/cooling pattern of the entire atmosphere follows the prediction of the anthropogenic hypothesis instead.

I have focused on the solar hypothesis, but if some other scientific hypothesis were to come forward that might explain the data, what I have said would apply to it also. I respect this type of skepticism, and so should every scientist. It has a fine tradition in the history of science and serves a great purpose even when the skeptical alternate hypotheses turn out to be incorrect.

“It’s a natural cycle,” a pseudo-scientific excuse that sounds scientific to people who don’t know better

You might have noticed a stark difference in tone between that heading and the previous one. There’s a reason for that. The second group of climate-change skeptics are more respectable than the third (which I’ll get to) because they don’t deny the climatic data record, but the explanation that they propose for it is not scientifically legitimate. “It is a natural cycle” is essentially a tautology to science, which is about the predictable—i.e., cyclical with the same circumstances—workings of nature. Taken literally, it is an acknowledgment that the phenomenon belongs in the domain of natural science, which we already know! With the context and connotation specific to climate change, this non-explanation amounts to little more than saying, “I don’t know what it is, but I don’t believe it’s what they say it is.”

Natural cycles in meteorology and climatology obviously exist. However, in order for a proposed cycle to be accepted in the scientific canon, actual details about it—with supporting observational evidence—must be provided. Otherwise it is not testable, not defined, and simply not a scientific hypothesis. It is an excuse for saying “I don’t know and I’ve got nothing.”

Any proposed explanation, or hypothesis, for a set of observed data should be testable. That means an additional set of observations can be gathered that either confirms or refutes the hypothesis (within a statistical confidence interval). Granted, within the past few decades, the rise of progressive ideology in academia has caused postmodernist relativistic philosophy to—I’ll say to contaminate discourse about science, because I, along with almost all scientists I know, remain firmly an old-school empiricist. If the methodology is sound, there’s no relativistic “catch” about the data gathered. Postmodernist philosophers of science can debate the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, but we empiricists will consider the radius of the pinhead and the Planck length and give an exact number, in the meantime. 😉 In the domain of actual scientific experimentation, especially in the realms of natural science, empiricism still rules the roost. This means that data rule the roost, and the claim “it’s a natural cycle” with no additional explanation of what the supposed “cycle” consists of is not something for which data can even be tested. There is no specific claim made, so there is nothing to test.

The deniers and defamers: “They’re all making up their observations to get grant money!”

This is the type of skepticism that I said I took extreme offense to, and I am not going to be charitable toward these people. They are attacking the integrity of my entire discipline with no supporting evidence, and I do not owe any politeness to people who are calling my people a bunch of frauds.

It, unfortunately, seems to be on the upswing. I suspect this is because of the political polarization that I mentioned in the very first paragraph. The people saying this crap tend to be complete scientific illiterates, most commonly political talking heads/columnists and their legions of trained keyboard warriors. They have a conspiracy theory mindset in which only their approved sources of “information” can be trusted and everything else is in on the conspiracy to undermine their ideology. If the trusted people—the columnists and talking heads—say that climate scientists go to the Arctic and make up data because they love living high on the hog with their grant money, well, the keyboard ignorati will believe that without question and repeat it.

There was a scandal in the UK about climate scientists saying suspicious-sounding things in e-mails. “Climategate,” as it was dubbed, was investigated thoroughly, and no scientific misconduct was found. The infamous phrase “hide the decline” referred to minimizing the contamination of a climate data set by a poor source of historical data. Why use poor data? Well, because when it comes to any period before the Enlightenment in any area of the globe other than the West, there really aren’t human-recorded weather observations to speak of, and we use what we have in nature. We know that some are better than others. It is scientifically sound to discount less reliable observations in a data pool.

A character defamation suit by climatologist Michael Mann against a right-wing magazine and a writer for it is (to my knowledge) currently underway. This rag apparently alleged that Mann falsified his data. Again, there was a very early (late 1990s) Nature article with Mann as lead author that had some historical climate graphs of dubious statistical quality. He has done work in the field since then, and in any case, a poor article in a borderline pop-sci magazine (as opposed to a journal of climatology, which would have higher standards) is certainly not the final word in climatology. To hear these deniers say it, though, it is the underlying foundation of a house of cards that they clearly believe is anthropogenic climate change theory.

In sum, the skeptics who propose alternative, but scientifically testable, hypotheses about the data are respectable. They are carrying on a long tradition of contributing to the scientific enterprise, and it really isn’t fair for ideological keyboard warriors on the other side of the aisle to bash them. The skeptics who propose the excuse “theory” of some unspecified “natural cycle” are at least respectful of the data, but they are not operating within a true scientific framework, and they are probably further muddying the understanding of laypeople of just how the scientific profession works. However, the skeptics who deserve no respect whatsoever, the ones who are actively undermining science by claiming that it is just part of a grand conspiracy to suppress their political ideology, are the ones who make unfounded accusations against the character of researchers.

I’ve said before that proven research fraud is a career-ender in science. The ironic thing about these jerks is that their stream of offensive character defamation might actually make it harder for actual frauds to be rooted out in any area of science. People have a tendency to protect their own “tribe” when they are under attack, and it is conceivable that the calls of “fraud” from people with a political agenda could harden even empirically minded scientists against the idea of appearing to cede anything to a pack of rabid dogs who are clearly not motivated by a desire for integrity within science. Why give them fuel,one might reason. Distrust of the first type of skeptics, the ones who are respectable, might be a casualty as well, and that would be unfortunate. These are yet more possible outcomes of the vast and destructive reach of political polarization. Not all climate skeptics are created equal, and it’s important to sort out the ones worth listening to from the ones who deserve the back of your hand.

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